Sergio Bernal is 51 years old, he is Argentine and he attributes to the Virgin of the Rosary having saved his life in a way that he believes is inexplicable during the floods in Valencia (Spain) on October 29, which caused more than 200 deaths and the destruction of thousands. of homes and belongings.
For some time now he has lived in Albal, a town south of the Valencian capital, very close to the most affected area and a few kilometers from very affected places such as Paiporta, Sedaví, Alfafar, Benatuser or Masanasa.
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On the day of the flood, “the atmosphere felt strange, because it had been cold during the day and then in the afternoon, when I was going to go out, I felt hot air,” Sergio, who works in a car repair company, recalls to ACI Prensa. old cars.
It was around 8 pm when he took a car to return home. His roommate warned him that Albal was already flooding while he was driving on the highway. At that moment, traffic stopped and he looked for alternatives to get home.
Given that the situation could get complicated, he decided to put some gasoline in the car and, when he was in the middle of the operation, “the service station began to flood and I had to get into the car on the right side, because I couldn’t get in.” “I would have had time to turn around.”
Looking for shelter, he headed towards a bridge that connects with Sedaví. But “when I had 100 meters left, the cars started to back up and I see that the water is coming with garbage, with mud, with everything, at an impressive speed, already with 40 centimeters of water.”
Without knowing the place and without the help of a GPS, he went looking for dry land. “It wasn’t raining, there was no indication that anything serious was going to happen. We still didn’t know what had happened in the upper part of the mountain,” he remembers.
He decided to park next to a construction site. He managed to communicate with his family, to whom he sent a video: “Stay calm. I have water at the door, but everything is fine.” In just 20 minutes, the level rose to 50 centimeters. immediately, the 70s. “It was all very fast, and it was the upper part of town,” he points out.
The power went out, but Sergio managed to see a floating garbage container, then a car: “When I saw the car floating I started to worry,” explains Sergio. And it was no wonder, because it didn’t take long until one of them hit him.
After a while, he hears a big explosion. Glass burst in a nearby building. It was the Sedaví City Hall, although he did not know it.
“I feel like the car is moving and starting to take me backwards. The only thing I asked was that another car not get on top of me, because if the other car gets on top of me and breaks my windshield…” he adds in his narration.
In the middle of the night, the car got stuck on a bollard when it managed to open a door. He decided to look for a better shelter: “How do I get out of here?” he asked himself, while looking at one meter and twenty centimeters of water.
About 40 meters away was the building under construction: “The only thing I can do is get there to get out of the current,” he thought, even though “the strength of the current was impressive.”
“When I was one meter away from getting there, the people in front shouted at me to look for the stairs to get to the first floor. I found it, but there was a pocket of debris ahead. I pushed him and he came. I don’t know how it happened,” Sergio describes.
Throughout this time, Sergio reproached himself for not having reached the Sedaví Town Hall square where he thought he would have been safer. However, at 4 in the morning, when he was able to move, he went there “with very cold and everything wet” and realized that he was wrong, because “all the cars were turned around, piled up.”
They left him for dead
He decided to go back to his car and try to rest for a while. The people who passed by, and who came from the lower part of the town, said: “He is dead.” Sergio responded to them, while still lying down.
A couple in their 70s asked him how he had spent the night. After telling her, the woman began to cry, excited, explaining that right next door is the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary and that “beyond the dirt, it was intact.”
Before walking home, he decided to leave the car locked. When he checked it to see if he could start it, he couldn’t believe it:
“I take out all the garbage that was on top, I open the engine, it is splashed with mud, but clean. How can it be? I looked at the oil and it was clean. I looked at the air intake and the filter was completely dry… Everything. No water has entered this car, how can that be?”
He manages to start the car’s engine and leaves it idling. Some people watching the scene show their perplexity. Sergio looks at the interior “the dry seats, both the front and the rear. There was an inch of mud on the floor, splashed on the door because it was left open for five hours in the current. The door pockets, which are at seat height, had mud inside, but the seats were dry,” he describes with amazement.
On the afternoon of Wednesday the 30th, Sergio managed to walk to his house in Albar, with the idea of returning on Saturday.
“Son, something pulled me out of the water.”
On Thursday of that week, Sergio spoke with one of the sons who live in Argentina, who announced that he would go the following Sunday to give thanks to the Virgin of the Rosary in San Nicolás, province of Buenos Aires. It is a place where thousands of pilgrims come from the Argentine city of Rosario every September 25.
He also wanted to go to the parish of Sedaví, moved by an intimate conviction, which he had conveyed to his family: “I’m going to go to church because, son, something pulled me out of the water.”
During the worst hours, “the only thing I asked God was to get me out of there, because I didn’t want my family to live with that memory,” he shares with ACI Prensa. At the same time, he states very confidently: “I was never afraid.”
“What I feel is that something happened to me because everything was erased from my mind for a moment and I appeared in a safe place and I left a place that I couldn’t leave,” reiterates Sergio, who with his wife forms a Catholic couple. committed to his community, as they were First Communion catechists.
Great was her surprise and joy when she discovered that the parish she intended to go to is entrusted to the Virgin of the Rosary, patron saint of Sedaví and also of her hometown, Rosario.
The bishop who crowned the Virgin of the Rosary of San Nicolás married her
Upon discovering this special presence of the Virgin of the Rosary in his adventure, Sergio considers it important to remember that the priest who married him and his sister and who accompanied his father when he died was Mons. Héctor Sabatino Cardelli.
Ordained a priest in the Archdiocese of Rosario in 1968, he was named auxiliary bishop of that ecclesiastical jurisdiction in 1995. He then carried out his pastoral activity in the Diocese of Concordia between 1998 and 2004, when he was transferred to the Diocese of San Nicolás de los Arroyos, where he remained until his retirement in 2016.
Mons. Cardelli was in charge of crowning the Virgin of the Rosary of San Nicolás in 2009, as a delegate of Pope Benedict XVI. The prelate died on November 7, 2022, the same day that Sergio settled in Spain.
A sign in advance of the Virgin of the Rosary
As if all these coincidental circumstances to which Sergius attributes a divine origin were not enough, he adds one more in his narrative.
It happened on October 6, Sunday, three weeks before the tragedy broke out in Spain. It was the eve of the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.
Sergio’s daughter-in-law, Carolina, who was not a big believer, wanted to go to Mass. And since they live near the Rosario Cathedral, they went there. Sergio’s son, upon returning, sent Sergio a picture of the Virgin of the Rosary.
In the conversation with his son, Sergio told him: “Look, there are times when things don’t go well, but we must never lose faith, son, because no matter how bad we are, God is there. The thing is that God’s timing is not ours, but God never leaves us alone if we have faith and trust in Him.”
“The Virgin was present and was calling us”
When he discovered that he was going to the Rosario parish in Sedaví, he put all the pieces together and Sergio called his family: “Everything is now closed. What happened to Carolina was not a coincidence. The Virgin was present and was calling us.”
“She is a goddess,” Sergio concludes. I talked about it with my family and told them: You know what? We are instruments, we are witnesses, we are living testimony.” When asked how he is these days, Sergio responds “better than ever” and people don’t believe it.
“I can’t feel better. “I feel protected, protected, present in the Virgin, like she didn’t leave me alone,” he explains before acknowledging that he still has a hard time narrating it: “I’m talking to you and that anguish grips me because it really is something that moves me.”
Almost concluding the conversation, Sergio acknowledges that, until now, “although one is devoted to the Virgin, it is not that I tear my clothes for the Virgin.” What’s more, his most deeply rooted Marian devotion is to the Virgin in her dedication to Untie Knots, not so much to that of the Rosary. At least it has been that way, until now.
As a culmination of the conversation, Sergio says that he has been in the position of having surgery several times throughout his life, some of them with serious risk to his life and his conclusion remains the same: “I have gone through many in my life. and I always say: I put everything in God’s hands.”
Nicholas de Cardenas
Born in 1980, I am a Spanish husband and father and journalist with more than 20 years of experience in print and digital media, specializing in sociopolitical and religious information. I have worked for more than 10 years in defense of human rights and have accreditations in Journalism and Comprehensive Communication. Since July 2022, I have been a correspondent for ACI Prensa and EWTN Noticias in Spain, covering international events of the Catholic Church.